What Makes a King
by Ishie
Summary: Feet pounding down the corridor, robes flapping around his legs, Neville wondered when he'd stopped thinking before reacting. Deathly Hallows fic; title from The Wizard of Oz


_Deathly Hallows_ fic, started in 2007, finished in 2009. Thanks be to inkdot for the beta.  
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**Feet pounding down the corridor, robes flapping around his legs, Neville wondered when he'd stopped thinking before reacting. There had been a time when it seemed like almost everything that came out of his mouth was carefully weighed and examined first. Of course, there were plenty of times when things slipped past, but this new practise of blurting out words as they floated up through his brain...

It would be terrifying if it didn't feel so damned good.

He skidded around a corner and twitched his wand toward a tapestry of Wendelin the Weird giggling atop a bonfire. The fabric fell away from the wall and stretched itself to touch both sides of the corridor. He turned long enough to fire a permanent sticking charm at each of the corners of the tapestry, creating a barrier, then sped away. It wasn't much but it might buy him a few more minutes, long enough to find a safe place to hide. Not that there were many safe places left in Hogwarts these days. In fact, there were really only two.

Neville pulled up short at the end of the corridor and leaned his head against the wall. There was a door somewhere but he couldn't immediately remember if this was a wall that needed tickling or a friendly _Alohomora_. He heard shouts on the other side and struggled to catch his breath. Were they headed toward him or moving away? He backed away from the wall a few steps, wand held at the ready. Minutes ticked by and he grew more and more tense, the muscles in his neck and his wand arm growing tight as he waited for someone to blast through the wall.

Finally, he heard his name bellowed from somewhere in the warren of passageways behind him. He ran forward with both arms outstretched, the spell on the tip of his tongue and one hand ready to tickle the stones in case the spell didn't work, when the wall gave an audible sigh and rippled out of his way. He grinned and stuck a hand up to brush the underside of the keystone that had revealed itself.

Gran had drilled into him at a very early age that a gentleman always thanked those who helped him. He wasn't entirely sure that the wall had done it consciously but he was grateful all the same.

He shot out onto the wide landing and slid to a stop. The wall sighed back into place behind him, blocking the sounds of his pursuers, and he took a moment to get his bearings. Directly ahead was the marble staircase that wound its way up through all seven floors of the castle and to his right was the hallway that he'd run down just moments before. On his left was a statue of a goblin whose name he'd never learnt and the passageway back to the boys' toilets. Or maybe it was the Prefect's Bathroom. Suddenly, he wasn't sure which floor he was on.

The thumps and bellows from the other side of the wall were getting closer, so Neville stopped wasting time trying to remember how many flights he had climbed and dived for the stairs. He cleared them three at a time and raced up toward what he hoped was the safety of the Gryffindor common room. Just as his head came level with the next floor, the wall below gave way with a groan and coarse shouts echoed through the halls. With a gasp, he threw himself up onto the landing and scrambled for cover on his hands and knees.

On the floor below, his pursuers seemed to be arguing with each other over which direction to take.

"Psst!" a voice hissed from behind him. Neville craned his head back until he found himself staring at an upside-down landscape. A small man hopped up and down, waving a sword under... _over_ his head.

"_Sir Cadogan_?"

The tiny painted knight cackled and swept his helm up away from his face. "I'll head off the treacherous knaves!" he shouted as he ran out of the landscape and disappeared into the painted woodland of the next frame.

With a hand clutched against the stitch in his side, Neville ran down one corridor, then another, before scuttling backward into a niche to try to figure out which way to go. He needed to get somewhere safe but he was so hopelessly turned around that he felt like a first-year again. None of the portraits and landscapes seemed familiar, though he knew he must have passed them a hundred times.

He could hear Sir Cadogan still shouting as he hurried down through the paintings on the stairs. Thundering feet echoed along the corridors below and Neville took off again, trying to put as much distance between himself and his pursuers as he could.

A hand shot out of an alcove and pulled him head-first into a solid door.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," Lavender whispered as he rubbed the knot quickly rising at his temple. Her wand-tip tapped lightly at the sore spot and a quick rush of heat flashed down into his neck, bypassing all the other, older dark bruises on his face. "Better?"

Neville nodded. He didn't recognise the muttered spell but it worked loads faster than his own meagre attempts at healing.

"Come on, you'd best keep moving. Terry's done a transfiguration on his hair to look like yours but it could go at any moment - his wand really isn't dealing at well with whatever that Pansy did to it," Lavender nearly snarled as she tugged him along the corridor. "He'll lead the Carrows on for as long as it lasts."

He dug in his heels, for all the good that did. She was terribly strong for such a slender girl. "No, I can't let him-"

"Yes, you can and, yes, you will. You don't have to play the hero all the time, Neville."

He was so flabbergasted by the idea that anyone would think he was even attempting such a thing that he hardly noticed when she shoved him behind a statue of Gifford Ollerton.

"Stay there," she hissed. "When you hear the boom, run as far and as fast as you can. Find somewhere to hide until they've turned their sights on someone else. One of us will let you know by coin when it's safe enough to come back."

She turned to go and Neville reached out to grab her by the hand. His sun-darkened skin looked pale against hers. "Don't. They'll-"

Lavender looked down at her hand in his and said, with a flirtatious smile, "They'll _try_." She leaned in close to him and whispered, "I know all sorts of out-of-the-way places."

He braced himself as she kissed him, fast and hard against his split lip. Before he could stutter out a breath, she was gone, her robes fluttering out of sight around a corner. Her footsteps faded almost as quickly and he found himself straining to hear just one more.

"Just when I thought the day couldn't get weirder," Neville whispered to himself. He heard giggling from a picture somewhere above his head and blushed furiously. Waiting for the boom, and wondering how she planned to create one, seemed to take several lifetimes. Most of those lifetimes he spent wondering just where the world had taken the wrong turn that led him to being kissed by Lavender Brown while running for his life.

When it came, it wasn't so much a boom as a dull roar that shook dust loose from far overhead and made several mice in a painted basket squeak in terror. He ran away from the statue and the noise, up a spiral staircase, through several disused rooms, and across a gallery into the seventh floor corridor. The Room of Requirement was his last, best option. After what his friends were doing to help him get away, he couldn't in good conscience bring the Carrows down on their heads in the only place they still had relative safety.

Barnabas the Barmy twirled from one end of his tapestry to the other as Neville paced past him three times, concentrating fiercely on the sanctuary and protection he needed the room to provide. When the door finally swung open, he leaped inside and slammed it closed again. He barely gave the furnishings a once-over before he collapsed onto a low-slung squashy armchair and hung his head over the seat back.

He felt drained, both in body and spirit. For seven long months, he'd been fighting back against the Carrows and their network of spies within the school, not knowing who to trust or even if he should trust anyone at all. He longed for the Hogwarts he'd discovered as a first-year, when his terror of Potions class and Draco Malfoy's taunts had seemed like the worst trials he'd ever face. He wouldn't even mind sitting the O.W.L.S. again, even if it meant spending days on end in the library without seeing the sun or feeling dirt on his fingers.

Most of the candles had guttered out and the room was dark by the time he felt restored enough to try moving again. His neck pinched and his throat felt raw, but that was nothing compared to the agony that shot through his knee when he tried to stand. He vaguely remembered a rush of light from one of Alecto Carrow's spells bouncing off a piece of polished glass to graze against his leg. All the running hadn't helped much either.

Neville lit his wand and hobbled toward a brace of candles set atop a bookshelf. When he'd lit enough to be able to see, he pulled off his robes and dropped them on the floor next to one of the bunks. There was a washstand next to the head of the bed and the water was icy cold as he splashed it on his face. Pink drops of blood swirled down to the bottom of the bowl as he tried to clean out the slash across his cheek that still, weeks later, refused to heal.

He was exhausted. Everything hurt, even the spot on his head that Lavender had partially healed for him. He ached in places he didn't even know could ache, and he hadn't been allowed out onto the grounds in more than a week. The only things that kept him going were the letter from Gran tucked inside his robes and the certainty that he could and would keep the DA together for Harry Potter. When Harry came back, he could go back to being normal, dull Neville. There would be no more being called a hero, even disparagingly. No more being this stranger who had taken over his body but couldn't hold his tongue, and didn't think even once before he threw himself between an outstretched wand and a student cowering in a corner.

It was almost uncomfortably hot in the room once he finished washing up, donned his robes again, and burrowed under the blankets of the bunk nearest the door. Even the stone walls seemed warmer and less inclined to hold onto the chill of winter indefinitely. He continued to catalogue the room's advantages over his cold, narrow bed in the Gryffindor common room under the eye of one of the Carrows' informants until he fell into another doze.

His dreams were full of shadows and slithering things just outside his range of vision. He would escape from one only to run headlong into another, all the time hearing disembodied voices crying out to him from somewhere too far away to reach.

He woke slowly and stayed wrapped in his blankets for a long time, unwilling to trade the relative safety of his nightmares for what had become his reality. With no windows and his watch still somewhere in Gryffindor Tower, he had no way of knowing how much time had passed. It felt like days since Lavender had pushed him behind the statue. At the memory of her kiss, his face flushed again and he suddenly remembered what she'd said about letting him know when it was safe to come out of hiding.

The coin was warm in his hand when he finally rescued it from the tangle of bedclothes and robes, but it was warm from his own body heat; the time of their last raid on the Restricted Section in the library was still scratched around the edge. He shoved it back into his pocket and started poking through the room to see what it had thought his sanctuary would require. There was no toilet, much to his and his bladder's dismay, but there were a handful of chamber pots tucked into a narrow cupboard and what he thought was probably a privy behind a door nearly painted shut. There was no food either, but the pitcher under the washstand was still, or again, full of cold clear water.

On one of the bookshelves, he found a volume of protective charms he'd never heard of before and settled in to read, occasionally getting up to stretch his aching knee or practise something from the book. The coin weighed heavily in his pocket and he pulled it out more than a dozen times before he'd finished the first chapter. Each time, though, it stayed stubbornly cold and unchanged. He finally stopped checking it sometime in the middle of the third chapter.

After another six chapters, Neville's stomach growled, louder than it had the whole day. He also went a bit woozy when he stood to put the book away on his way to the chamber pots. On the way back, he tried to remember if a book transfigured into food would remain transfigured long enough to be digested, or whether he'd rip a giant book-sized hole in his innards. He was just on the verge of trying when the coin in his pocket finally heated up.

His stomach growled again as he pulled the coin free, tilting it to catch the candlelight on the edge. As he squinted to read the message in the dim light, he hoped someone would have food waiting for him when he got out.

'Stay away - they know you're head of DA,' was the message someone had sent.

Neville's stomach plummeted. If the Carrows knew he'd been organising things in Harry's absence, he and most of his friends were no longer safe within Hogwarts. They probably wouldn't be much safer anywhere else, either. He had to find some way to get news from outside, to hear something other than the scratchy wireless reports with more code names than he could remember. There had to be a way to get word out of the castle as well, to let people know what was happening to the students.

He felt scared, suddenly, and helpless, in a way he hadn't felt since Bellatrix Lestrange had pointed her wand at him in the Department of Mysteries. He wanted to be far away, as far as possible from the evil and the pain and the cold. He wanted hot meals and clean clothes and to wake up in the morning without worrying. He wanted someone else to take up Harry's mantle, to plan and scheme and coax his terrified friends into taking one more stand.

He wanted to see Gran.

"Well, come on then!"

On the long wall in front of him, a picture had shifted place slightly, revealing a dark room or passageway behind it. On the canvas in the frame, a young, fair-haired girl stared at him with eyes that seemed familiar, then turned and walked away. He wondered if she might be one of Luna's great-aunts or something.

The voice wasn't hers, though. It was coming from the far end of a tunnel, and it sounded like a man who was shouting without wanting anyone to hear.

"I'm not going to wait around all day, you blasted boy. Either skive off over here for a sandwich and news of the outside world, or I'm shutting the passage."

Neville held his wand at the ready, and stepped into the wall.


End file.
